Researchers from the University of Birmingham (UK) and the University of Neuchatel (Switzerland) have found that wild bonobos, our closest living relatives in the primate world, communicate using a high-pitched call type, or “peep,” that requires context to be understood. The findings, published in the journal PeerJ, echo the context dependent manner in which human […]
Duke University anthropologists have been measuring more than 1,400 ancient and modern skulls, leading them to theorize that modern humans emerged at the same time as a lowering of testosterone levels. While modern humans appear in the fossil record from around 200,000 years ago, it was only about 50,000 years ago that the creation of […]
A controversial new paper from the University of Utah contends that human faces have evolved over time to minimize injury from punches to the face during fights. The new theory, detailed in the journalBiological Reviews, presents an alternative view to the long-held hypothesis that the robustness of our faces resulted largely from the need to […]
Bonobos and chimpanzees are closely related but bonobos lack of aggression, playfulness, and strong familial ties make them very different to their chimp cousins. Now, researchers say that these behavioral differences might be because bonobos retain elevated thyroid hormone concentrations well into adulthood, whereas in humans and chimps, levels decline after puberty. The researchers, from […]
Socially-learned cultural behavior thought to be unique to humans is also found among chimpanzees colonies, say scientists at the University of Liverpool. Historically, scientists believed that behavioral differences between colonies of chimpanzees were due to variations in genetics. A team at Liverpool, however, has now discovered that variations in behavior are down to chimpanzees migrating […]
Wild chimpanzees do not routinely experience menopause, suggests a Harvard University study, rebutting previous studies of captive individuals which had postulated that female chimpanzees reach reproductive senescence at 35 to 40 years of age. Together with recent data from wild gorillas and orangutans, the finding – described in Current Biology – suggests that human females […]
Even when food is plentiful above ground, chimps still choose to dig for roots and tubers, indicating that perhaps our hominid ancestors were not such big meat-eaters after all. Reporting in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the University of Southern California and the University of Wisconsin-Madison say that their work […]
Scientists at MIT and Harvard say the evolutionary split between humans and chimpanzees is much more recent – and more complicated – than previously thought. Their study, appearing in Nature, indicates that the two species could have split as recently as 5.4 million years ago. They also suggest that the speciation process was unusual, possibly […]
